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Currently showing blog posts for: July 2017 - . Go BACK to view all posts.

As I write this, it’s been just shy of a year since an attack on Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando Florida, killed 49 people – the deadliest mass shooting by a single gunman in US history. Shock at the murders reverberated throughout the United States and much of the world, inciting vigils in dozens of major cities. However, for gay people it was not only concern over yet another major shooting. As theories swirled of the gunman’s intentions, it came to be considered as an attack on the gay community, more precisely.

Gay venues in the US, just as in the UK and in London, are hard-won achievements of the gay community – legal, publicly known places of gay communion. For decades they have served not only as important places of socialising for LGBTQ communities, but also as safe spaces where an oft -misunderstood minority population can feel at ease. They serve a vital and unique function in supporting a marginal group (recall that it was only in 2003 that employment discrimination based on sexual orientation was officially forbidden).

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In London today, however, gay venues are closing day by day – in the past 15 years, over 100 have shuttered, o en victims of London’s soaring rents. Some, such as the famed Royal Vauxhall Tavern (see our feature), are locked into protracted battles of self-preservation. The RVT is one of the oldest and most iconic LGBTQ bars in the city, and the focus of a campaign by new night czar Amy Lamé to retain the landmark pub as a gay bar and performance space.

It’s in this context that I read Peter Ackroyd’s Queer City, a history of the gay experience in London (and, in fact, Londinium) since the Roman times through to today (noting, of course, that ‘gay’ wasn’t a category at the time when his story begins).

With humour and exceptional storytelling, Ackroyd reflects on a history of LGBTQ culture and spaces, notably its Roman lupanaria (or ‘wolf dens’, public pleasure houses), and the 18th-century ‘molly houses’, where men could meet and often dress in women’s clothes. He also casts a keen eye to performance and literature, claiming the Cantebury Tales to contain one of the first portraits of a London queer in the character of the Pardoner: a high-voiced, perpetually fair- shaven ‘mare’ of a man.

London’s millennia of history – before, between and after the lupanaria and molly houses – is a rollercoaster story of interchanging periods of permission, persecution, tolerance and criminalisation; of executions, celebrity, disease. It is an all-out tug of war, within which we still operate. Ackroyd’s text is rich with anecdote, so divinely laid out in narrative as to make it very difficult to surgically extract one of them for illustrative purposes – but suffice it to say there are many, and even when about some cruelty, they possess typical Ackroydian charm.

At some point, inevitably, we enter the author’s lifespan; anecdote meets sentiment. Of the collision of gay disco culture with the AIDS crisis, Ackroyd writes: ‘the thumping beat of disco music and the gyrations of scantily clad customers helped to define a movement of hedonism and consumerism that seemed set to define queer London of the 1980s. And then the music stopped.’

And so begins the final pages of his book, a quick slide into the most recent decades of London’s history. We are in a period of normalisation of ‘queer’ culture, after a difficult recovery of the stigma of AIDS. So much so that queer culture, by his estimation, is ‘in elegant retreat’ – ‘the queer community,’ Ackroyd reflects, ‘has never quite made up its mind whether it desires or fears integration.’

Today’s London is one where not only rents are high, but persecution is relatively low. Paired with the ability for LGBTQ to connect digitally, the spaces that were centres of activity and sanctuaries of acceptance are not quite as needed for the moment.

Ackroyd, one of London’s most eminent chroniclers, doesn’t leave us without an uplifting conclusion, however. His final thought is an ode to this city – it is a celebration as much as a history. London is a resilient, diverse city, a place where the world can feel at home – people of any sex or sexuality, as he expresses in the stories told in Queer City. This capacity for diversity, he reminds us, is London’s greatest triumph.

The All Parliamentary Group for London’s Planning and Built Environment gathered in Portcullis House last week to hear a panel of experts on the implications of Grenfell Tower for London’s housing stock.

The session was introduced by Rupa Huq, MP for Ealing Central and Acton, and NLA chairman, Peter Murray, who said it was important to learn from events and ensure that the right mechanisms are in place so similar disasters do not happen again.

Sam Webb, principal at Sam Webb Chartered Architect, was involved in the fallout from the Ronan Point collapse in 1968 as an expert witness for the families involved. Webb said he believed ruptured gas mains were burning in the Grenfell Tower fire, that nobody did a fire risk assessment, and the panels beneath the windows burned through in four and a half minutes. Inside, wooden surfaces were painted with 10 coats of oil-based paint. After Ronan Point, Webb sent representations to the Home Office for changes to be made to blocks of flats he visited across the country, fearing that similar problems might ensue, but was met with little interest, the government saying that if they enacted part 3 of the Fire Precautions act it would make far too many people homeless.

‘They have known about this for a long time’, said Webb. Sue Foster, strategic director of neighbourhoods and growth at Lambeth Council said that four weeks on from the ‘terrible disaster’ of Grenfell there had been significant activity, some clarity, but an awful lot of uncertainty remains. It was unlikely that there would be a single point of failure, she said, but clearly there had been a focus on the cladding. One block in Lambeth has already had to be reclad, and the authority is doing ‘quite intrusive’ fire risk assessments over the next two weeks. ‘It is really important I can give reassurance to residents that they are and will remain safe’, she said.

More work is being done on water sprinklers as part of a solution, but tenant management issues, in particular, need ‘revisiting’. Finally, building regulations will have to be ‘fundamentally’ reviewed, as well as how they are administered; communication with residents is absolutely crucial; and local authorities need to pool resources to provide emergency responses but need resources from central government to do so.

One of the key problems, said Pat Hayes, managing director of Be First, LB Barking and Dagenham and former executive director of regeneration and housing at Ealing Council, is that building regulations are too ‘layered’ and need a fundamental review. They must be updated to reflect modern technology, methods of construction and ways of living, with the need to look at the efficiency of fire compartmentation strategies when ‘60s buildings are adapted. The other big issue was of the ‘intermediate landlord’ often putting in less fire-resistant doors, for example, and for approved fire plans without inspection of what is produced.

Despite the huge pressure for housing stock, we must also ensure the quality and safety of new high density homes is not compromised, but it should be remembered that more people die from fires in street properties than in towers, said Hayes. Adrian Dobson, executive director of members, RIBA, said the inquiry into the Grenfell Tower fire must concentrate not just on the cause of the fire, but also the wider systemic and regulatory context. Responsibility was another factor – the onsite clerk of works used to be the independent overseer of construction and workmanship on behalf of the client, but this role has all but disappeared today. In the 1970s more than half of practising architects were employed in the public sector – today that is down to just 6%. ‘So have we lost some expertise within our housing delivery bodies?’ he asked.

Finally, Sarah Davies, head of project management at Pocket Living said that building regulations treat new build, change of use and refurbishment in residential quite differently, with the first two inspected to comply with modern regulations but the last only required to ensure that the situation is no worse than existing. Building control thus often feels unable to intervene on some schemes where it feels strongly. Davies also suggested that London in the long term may wish to consider ensuring there is surplus capacity to house people immediately affected by similar incidents in the future.

Discussion of the issues from the audience included questions over the suitability of the housing provided for those affected by Grenfell; the paucity of affordable housing that is available; ‘stay put’ and sprinkler polices during incidents; the issue of ‘fire engineering’ schemes through planning and whether ‘investment housing’ could be used in what is a ‘national emergency.’ ‘It isn’t a tragedy, it’s an atrocity’, said Webb, ‘and it is being directed at poor people’.

13 July 2017. Following the terrible events at Grenfell Tower, the APPG for London Planning and Built Environment will bring together experts to update on the wider responses across the city, followed by a discussion on the wider implications for the delivery and management of social housing.

Speakers include local authority representatives, Sue Foster, LB Lambeth and Pat Hayes, Be First, Barking & Dagenham (former LB Ealing), and experts, including Peter Murray, Chair of the London Society and New London Architecture.

Tickets are now available to non-members for the Society’s summer party on 10 August. Join us for food and drink, and listen to live music as you catch up with old friends and meet new people at the social event of the year.

We’ve gone full rus in urbe this time round, with the party being hosted at the Oasis City Farm, a stone’s throw from Grimshaw’s old Waterloo International, tucked into a corner of the Archbishop’s Park in SE1.

Opened in 2015, Oasis have transformed this strip of land into a vibrant community resource, connecting children of the city with food and farming. There’ll be an opportunity to examine the magnificent new wooden barn (by architects Feilden Fowles) and to hear more about the project, its achievements so far, and its vision for the future.

Tickets are limited and last year’s summer party sold out, so make sure you don’t miss out. Members can buy tickets for themselves and their guests for just £25, non-members tickets are £35. Corporate Supporters are entitled to up to five free tickets (please email director@londonsociety.org.uk for details).

We’re run with a small committee that gives of its time entirely voluntarily, two members of staff that work a couple of days a week, a freelance events person, a journal editor and designer (and contributors) who put in inordinate amounts of time and effort to get each issue out.

That gives members around 50 events a year (which had over 2,000 people come to them in 2016), two issues of the Journal, the Society’s representation in the APPG, and this blog and our social media.

We want to achieve more – more events, more publications, more members – and need help from members to do so. For example:

Helping out at events: anything from setting up the room to reporting on the discussion to go on the blog (you’d get free tickets of course).

Contributing to the blog or the journal: got something to say? Perhaps you’ve got journalistic or other writing experience and are keen to keep your hand in – we’d love to hear from you.

Marketing and PR: we want more people coming to our events and more people joining the Society. Can you help us with that?

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